Couldn't this problem be solved if all apmlifiers also had adjustable (analog or digital) compressors built into them? That way, the user could adjust the amount of compression they wanted, along with the volume.
Normally, I don't like heavily compressed audio, but there are times that I'd like to compress, for example, a recording of a Classical symphony. Only because the full dynamic range makes it just too loud to play in a satisfactory manner, in an apartment.
Does anyone know if there are amps out there that have adjustable compressors in them?
1. Switchers. People who want to give OS X a go, but they're concerned it might not run all their programs or have equivalents. Now they can buy a Mac and be sure it will work with their existing stuff while they figure out if OS X cuts it for them.
2. Gamers. The old argument of Macs "don't have any games!" may not be an issue for you or I, but for many it is. Now, if they could just reboot into Windows when they fancy some gaming, they'd be a lot more willing to get a Mac. We eagerly await some benchmarks once they've got 3D acceleration going.
3. Business Users. In the past, a PowerBook or PowerMac would be a no-no in most businesses, because it didn't run Windows. Now, there's a chance that techies can ask their bosses for a Mac without getting shot to hell.
All in all this is very good news for the proliferation of OS X, which I find to be the nicest GUI OS so far. It tends not to get in the way of doing stuff as much as other OSes (especially Windows) do.
Yes, the tech meant that a few cutbacks were made. The main character is strangely blocky, but if you can get over that tiny detail everything else is utterly sumptuous. The artistry of this game is second-to-none, showing a kind of attention to detail in envoronment that out-does what Nintendo managed in Zelda Wind Waker and Namco's Resident Evil 4. Maybe Resident Evil 4 has a bit more texture detail and polygons, but it can't match the feel of the enviroment in SoTC. RE4 feels like a traditional computer game enviroment, with strict, defined edges, SoTC you never feel that, you only feel that you're exploring a real place. With the exception of the lead-charater, the animation is also the best I've seen in any 3D game. Take some time to observe how the birds fly across the horizon, how Colossi move, how you move as you're thown around by a beast, how puddles splash, how things look when you get dragged underwater by that big sea-eal, it's the work of real artists. In short, it's easily the most immersive gaming world I've ever played in, in my 20+ years of computer-gaming.
A large Plasma HDTV set with the ability to play and burn DVDs, import and play audio CDs, import and display digital photos and movies, analogue and digital TV tuner all from a Front Row-esque interface.
OS X will not be installed on this unit, just the media elements, although media will be available wirelessly on OS X or Windows XP machines.
Big new feature will be the ability to stream real-time DVD-quality movies directly to the screen via the upgraded.Mac service. Various movies will be avalialbe straight away, inc. all of Pixars!
Will be priced roughly the same as an average Plasma HDTV and will be sold with a catch line, something like, "Same price as an HDTV, but with all this extra lovely stuff" Will be US only, initially
Price - ~$3,500
2. Intelligent HDTV Set-top Box
Will sport the same features as above, but will be in a set-top box, for pluggin in to HDTVs or standard TVs.
Will not have full OS X on it either.
US only initially.
Price - ~$499
3. iBook Intel
Will sport a new form-factor that will mimick the current generation iPods and the iMac. Its top will be set in a layer of see-through plastic and a lower layer of white plastic and the lower halve will be set in stainless steel and white plastic.
Will be capable of using the new video.Mac services via its built-in wireless networking.
There will be some virtualisation software which allows Windows to run natively in OS X.
Will sport much nicer screens than current iBooks. Widescreen.
Price - New low price for base model: $799, then £999 for the top-end model.
4. iLife '06
Garageband 3.0 iPhoto 6.0 iTunes 6.0 (already released) iMovie HD 2.0 iDVD 6.0 iWeb (?) - A new easy to use web-design application with lovely looking templates.
Will support blogging, various standard php-based forms and some kind of database functionality.
Will tie into an upgraded.Mac service that will offer mySQL and PHP, although this will be invisible to the user from iWeb. It will just work.
Price - Free with Macs or $79 to buy separately,.Mac price will be reduced ~20%
5. iWork '06
Pages 2.0 Keynote 3.0 Calc (?) 1.0 - A new speadsheet program with a nice selection of good-looking templates, useful for home-users / small businesses
Price - $79
That's all folks! Here's hoping this comes true!
Slashdot In Opera Is Faster Than Any Other Browser
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
The #1 reason for Slashdot readers to use Opera is that moving back and forth between numerous comment levels occurs far, far ("fa, fa, fa, fa, faaaa... oooeeeeyyy!") faster in Opera than in *any* other browser. If you spend most of your day sucking every last detail of every story in this site, you'll really appreciate the time savings. So, all you uber-geeks could well be trimming months - maybe even years - off you life by *not* using Opera. Erm, yeah, well... maybe not quite that much and Firefox is still very nice, for sure, but give it a go with the old Right-click + Left-Click (and visa-versa) mouse-gestures and see if you feel happier and snappier.
Now, is anyone geekish enough to compare the time differences moving between Slashdot comments-tree levels in IE, Firefox and Opera? Oh, go on...
Search for 'Apple' returns 15 results, no next button.
Search for 'Lovely' (with a capital L) returns 'Sorry, no results were found containing "lovely"'.
Search for 'lovely' (with a lowercase l) returns lots of results.
Search for 'microsoft comedy routine' returns no results.
Oh well... better stick to Google for now...
...from an ax-weilding or gun-toting maniac? You're dead meat, just because of this law. It should make for some amusing new horror / comedy movie scenes!
I completely agree with what Bill says. And this has great cultural implications, because once again we watch the corporations reduce the quality of our culture, which they stole from us many years ago and are now selling back to us, with more and more contempt for us.
It's a chilling thought that in less that one-hundred years, we have allowed corporations to almost entirely dictate our culture. Just look around you. And, as when you get a monopoly with any product, it's bad for the market. In this case, it means that our culture is being sapped of any relevance to our every-day lives - instead it merely reflects the what corporations *thing* we're going through.
How can we change this?
I completely agree with G4from128k - on a very good TV system, MPEG-Artifacts make viewing much less satisfying than watching on VHS. It's nothing to do with the resolution or colour depth, just that there are huge, glaring, obvious, ugly blocks of flickering colour appearing all over the place (especially in shadows.) All of the time, regardless of scene.
So in, what I would argue is the most important way, watchability, DVD picture quality is worse than VHS. That is of course, providing that you measure quality in terms of how watchable an image is, rather than how hi-resolution it is.
Please tell me I'm not the only one's in the world who gets severely annoyed by MPEG-Artifacts and often thumps the table in rage, during the home-viewing of a motion picture at home on ones DVD-Disc.
In my early adolescent years, if I got killed at a really irritating point in any of my ZX Spectrum 128K +2 games I would put the computer on the floor and jump up and down on the keyboard until I'd vented my frustration. Don't forget that the CPU and Mobo was sitting directly under the keyboard, so this was not particularly bright behaviour. Of course, the keyboard became exceptionally bent, but even to this day, the machine still works fine. How's that for build quality?
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't this problem be solved if all apmlifiers also had adjustable (analog or digital) compressors built into them? That way, the user could adjust the amount of compression they wanted, along with the volume.
Normally, I don't like heavily compressed audio, but there are times that I'd like to compress, for example, a recording of a Classical symphony. Only because the full dynamic range makes it just too loud to play in a satisfactory manner, in an apartment.
Does anyone know if there are amps out there that have adjustable compressors in them?
Think about these scenarios:
1. Switchers. People who want to give OS X a go, but they're concerned it might not run all their programs or have equivalents. Now they can buy a Mac and be sure it will work with their existing stuff while they figure out if OS X cuts it for them.
2. Gamers. The old argument of Macs "don't have any games!" may not be an issue for you or I, but for many it is. Now, if they could just reboot into Windows when they fancy some gaming, they'd be a lot more willing to get a Mac. We eagerly await some benchmarks once they've got 3D acceleration going.
3. Business Users. In the past, a PowerBook or PowerMac would be a no-no in most businesses, because it didn't run Windows. Now, there's a chance that techies can ask their bosses for a Mac without getting shot to hell.
All in all this is very good news for the proliferation of OS X, which I find to be the nicest GUI OS so far. It tends not to get in the way of doing stuff as much as other OSes (especially Windows) do.
Yes, the tech meant that a few cutbacks were made. The main character is strangely blocky, but if you can get over that tiny detail everything else is utterly sumptuous. The artistry of this game is second-to-none, showing a kind of attention to detail in envoronment that out-does what Nintendo managed in Zelda Wind Waker and Namco's Resident Evil 4. Maybe Resident Evil 4 has a bit more texture detail and polygons, but it can't match the feel of the enviroment in SoTC. RE4 feels like a traditional computer game enviroment, with strict, defined edges, SoTC you never feel that, you only feel that you're exploring a real place. With the exception of the lead-charater, the animation is also the best I've seen in any 3D game. Take some time to observe how the birds fly across the horizon, how Colossi move, how you move as you're thown around by a beast, how puddles splash, how things look when you get dragged underwater by that big sea-eal, it's the work of real artists. In short, it's easily the most immersive gaming world I've ever played in, in my 20+ years of computer-gaming.
Will this mean free internet browsing at Nintendo's many free wi-fi hot-spots? If so, that's a rather nice give-away from the big N.
I'm not an idiot, you know.
Let others be the judge of that.
And my predictions!
.Mac service. Various movies will be avalialbe straight away, inc. all of Pixars!
.Mac services via its built-in wireless networking.
.Mac service that will offer mySQL and PHP, although this will be invisible to the user from iWeb. It will just work.
.Mac price will be reduced ~20%
1. Plasma Inteligent HDTV
A large Plasma HDTV set with the ability to play and burn DVDs, import and play audio CDs, import and display digital photos and movies, analogue and digital TV tuner all from a Front Row-esque interface.
OS X will not be installed on this unit, just the media elements, although media will be available wirelessly on OS X or Windows XP machines.
Big new feature will be the ability to stream real-time DVD-quality movies directly to the screen via the upgraded
Will be priced roughly the same as an average Plasma HDTV and will be sold with a catch line, something like, "Same price as an HDTV, but with all this extra lovely stuff"
Will be US only, initially
Price - ~$3,500
2. Intelligent HDTV Set-top Box
Will sport the same features as above, but will be in a set-top box, for pluggin in to HDTVs or standard TVs.
Will not have full OS X on it either.
US only initially.
Price - ~$499
3. iBook Intel
Will sport a new form-factor that will mimick the current generation iPods and the iMac. Its top will be set in a layer of see-through plastic and a lower layer of white plastic and the lower halve will be set in stainless steel and white plastic.
Will be capable of using the new video
There will be some virtualisation software which allows Windows to run natively in OS X.
Will sport much nicer screens than current iBooks. Widescreen.
Price - New low price for base model: $799, then £999 for the top-end model.
4. iLife '06
Garageband 3.0
iPhoto 6.0
iTunes 6.0 (already released)
iMovie HD 2.0
iDVD 6.0
iWeb (?) - A new easy to use web-design application with lovely looking templates.
Will support blogging, various standard php-based forms and some kind of database functionality.
Will tie into an upgraded
Price - Free with Macs or $79 to buy separately,
5. iWork '06
Pages 2.0
Keynote 3.0
Calc (?) 1.0 - A new speadsheet program with a nice selection of good-looking templates, useful for home-users / small businesses
Price - $79
That's all folks! Here's hoping this comes true!
The #1 reason for Slashdot readers to use Opera is that moving back and forth between numerous comment levels occurs far, far ("fa, fa, fa, fa, faaaa... oooeeeeyyy!") faster in Opera than in *any* other browser. If you spend most of your day sucking every last detail of every story in this site, you'll really appreciate the time savings. So, all you uber-geeks could well be trimming months - maybe even years - off you life by *not* using Opera. Erm, yeah, well... maybe not quite that much and Firefox is still very nice, for sure, but give it a go with the old Right-click + Left-Click (and visa-versa) mouse-gestures and see if you feel happier and snappier. Now, is anyone geekish enough to compare the time differences moving between Slashdot comments-tree levels in IE, Firefox and Opera? Oh, go on...
Search for 'Apple' returns 15 results, no next button. Search for 'Lovely' (with a capital L) returns 'Sorry, no results were found containing "lovely"'. Search for 'lovely' (with a lowercase l) returns lots of results. Search for 'microsoft comedy routine' returns no results. Oh well... better stick to Google for now...
...from an ax-weilding or gun-toting maniac? You're dead meat, just because of this law. It should make for some amusing new horror / comedy movie scenes!
I completely agree with what Bill says. And this has great cultural implications, because once again we watch the corporations reduce the quality of our culture, which they stole from us many years ago and are now selling back to us, with more and more contempt for us. It's a chilling thought that in less that one-hundred years, we have allowed corporations to almost entirely dictate our culture. Just look around you. And, as when you get a monopoly with any product, it's bad for the market. In this case, it means that our culture is being sapped of any relevance to our every-day lives - instead it merely reflects the what corporations *thing* we're going through. How can we change this?
I completely agree with G4from128k - on a very good TV system, MPEG-Artifacts make viewing much less satisfying than watching on VHS. It's nothing to do with the resolution or colour depth, just that there are huge, glaring, obvious, ugly blocks of flickering colour appearing all over the place (especially in shadows.) All of the time, regardless of scene. So in, what I would argue is the most important way, watchability, DVD picture quality is worse than VHS. That is of course, providing that you measure quality in terms of how watchable an image is, rather than how hi-resolution it is. Please tell me I'm not the only one's in the world who gets severely annoyed by MPEG-Artifacts and often thumps the table in rage, during the home-viewing of a motion picture at home on ones DVD-Disc.
Thanks for the enlightenment, Mr. Speers. Have you ever considered writing a book to share your ideas with a larger audience?
In my early adolescent years, if I got killed at a really irritating point in any of my ZX Spectrum 128K +2 games I would put the computer on the floor and jump up and down on the keyboard until I'd vented my frustration. Don't forget that the CPU and Mobo was sitting directly under the keyboard, so this was not particularly bright behaviour. Of course, the keyboard became exceptionally bent, but even to this day, the machine still works fine. How's that for build quality?